A Library of the Mind

Related Books:

1.
There is perhaps no more fitting summer job for a writer than processing books in the basement of a university library. To get up before the real heat of the day begins and descend into the air-conditioned cool of the dimly-lit basement archives is a particular kind of atmospheric trick, but emerging after a full day’s work into the thick evening is even better, since it mimics the way writers feel when they get up from a long grapple with a manuscript; your eyes are bleary, your head is half-dazed, and the hot summer night feels overly sharp, hyper-real, cluttered with shouts and sirens.

(I highly recommend an archiving job as a remedy for the effects of writer’s block, since it’s easy enough to pretend that a pile of close reading is a substitute for your own literary production. Your verbal overload is no less intense for being totally vicarious.)

All of this describes the job I worked last summer, in the rare books section of a local university library. I was assigned to a basement room nicknamed “the cage,” because most of the shelving was set off behind a wall of wire mesh, accessible only by a carefully guarded key. I did my work at a small desk in the corner, and when I wanted to enter the cage I had to ask for this key, and return it to its appointed hook straightaway when I was done.

The project that I was hired to work on is somewhat difficult to describe. Sometime in the early aughts, a famous bookstore in New York — I can’t tell you which one, on conditions of job-related secrecy — closed its doors forever, at which point several wealthy patrons banded together to buy its entire inventory (distressed periodicals and all) and hand said inventory over to a local university library. This inventory consisted of thousands upon thousands of volumes: some rare, some middling, some eminently forgettable. They had early editions of Finnegans Wake, nestled next to paperback Modern Library editions of the collected works of Thackeray, propped up against a stack of 25 cent magazines for teen movie lovers of the 1950s.

I am not a rare books specialist; I am not capable of making fine distinctions. I do not know a first edition unless it is clearly marked in the front of the book, preferably in large type, all capitals. Thus my job consisted only of logging the books, regardless of content or merit, into the computer system: name, title, ISBN, and relative condition.

There have been moments of excitement. I have shelved books from the personal libraries of Anaïs Nin and Joseph Mitchell. I have learned terms which include, but are by no means limited to: bastard title page, bumped corners, colophon, ex libris, flyleaf, foxing, worn boards, and gutter tear. I have held William Gaddis first editions and signed versions of nearly every title in Joyce Carol Oates’s massive oeuvre.

A New Yorker cartoon, featuring a man pushing a massive cube up a featureless hill, was taped to the wall above my supervisor’s desk. The caption: Extreme Sisyphus.

2.
Common themes in books, 19th to early-20th century:

Detailed author portraits on the title page, covered in thin, almost tissue-like paper (to prevent blotting?)

Inexplicably small, but also thick, multi-volume editions of the novels of Sir Walter Scott, of which multiple volumes are missing

Inscriptions from fathers and uncles in said novels, in loopy, almost illegible cursive, along the lines of: may this add to your education

3.
When one thinks of libraries in literature, the most famous reference point has to be Borges’sThe Library of Babel, in which the Argentine writer (in a joking mood) conceived of an infinite library, composed of a series of hexagonal rooms, and posited (half-ironically) that the library was a stand-in for the perfect divine creation: “the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god.”

Often, during my summer in the archives, I would reflect on the fact that all my work was only the reconstruction or (to be more accurate) weird vivisection of an already existing bookstore. The books I catalogued came to me in numbered trays, with each section number corresponding to a section of the now-departed bookstore, and on days when my mind really wandered — which was a higher percentage than I would have admitted to my immediate superiors — I considered the possibility of reconstructing the bookstore in my head, using the section numbers and the books I’d processed, recreating a sort of bookstore-of-the-mind.

Usually, however, I was interrupted from my reverie by one or another common typo:

Worn bards, utter tear.

And, even if I managed to keep my mental concentration long enough to maintain one section of this library-of-the-mind, the idea of trying to juggle multiple sections ended up being too much, and I was forced to give up the whole project, having only completed one of Borges’s hexagons.

Which reminds me of another quote from The Library of Babel:

“When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure.”

By the time I arrived at my archiving job, the project had already been going for nearly seven years, and over half of the books had been catalogued. Of course, each volume would still need to be judged and sorted by minds more discerning than mine, which meant that, like many projects conceived at the university level, it might last for much longer than the scope of ordinary human patience.

There is something strange about doing a job that you will never see finished, like Kafka’s Great Wall of China:

“Five hundred meters could be completed in something like five years, by which time naturally the supervisors were as a rule too exhausted and had lost all faith in themselves, in the building, and in the world.”

4.
Common themes in books, early- to mid-20th century:

Books of obscure poetry inscribed by nuns

Books published under the auspices and regulations of the U.S. Military

5.As a fiction writer, I am perhaps unusually interested in what makes a book last. Much of this I ascribe to pure ego. During my stint in the university library, I happened to come across the great English critic Cyril Connolly’sEnemies of Promise, which is a very odd and very vain book; it begins as an investigation of this very question, “why does a book last” (Is it prose style? Content? Political conviction?) only to devolve into a self-pitying investigation of why Cyril Connolly himself couldn’t write such a lasting book.

I assume that most readers of books do not engage in this sort of absurd behavior. Fiction writers have such high regard for themselves that they can’t see why they shouldn’t be immortal. Keeping their work in print is the next best thing available.

(An addendum: during my work in the archives I logged several thousand copies of Horizon, the British literary magazine which Connolly edited. Of the many names inside its covers, I recognized two.)

Still, if one puts pure vanity aside for a moment, the process by which a book survives more than a century is a fascinating thing. When I held a copy of Wilkie Collins’s 1868 novel The Moonstone, or an early American edition of Wuthering Heights, I’d sometimes reflect on the many deaths the book had to avoid on its way to me. It had to be bought, first of all, and not left to linger on a bookstore shelf, and later pulped — or, as is sometimes the case, burned. Then someone had to keep it after the first read, keep the bindings dry, move it from house to house, and later, after that person died, the book had to be inherited, or else sold, instead of thrown away; at the very least it had to be packed in such a way that the book block didn’t warp and the pages didn’t go moldy: all the little deaths to which a hardbound book is vulnerable.

There is a certain kind of immortality to a passed-down book — the sense of having outlived many human lives.

So what makes a book last — not just in the minds of critics and readers, but also as a physical object? What’s essential here is a combination of initial popularity, physical hardiness, and a sterling reputation. There were more copies of The Moonstone in circulation than a host of other Victorian mysteries, so it had a good start, and the hardback edition I handled one summer morning seemed to have lasted pretty well, but nobody reads Wilkie Collins anymore (my apologies, Moonstone aficionados, bless your cosseted Victorian hearts), and so I have my doubts about what will happen when the library higher-ups finally handle the archive’s copy.

The local university library can’t possibly hold all of the books I archived, much less the whole of the departed bookstore; many of the books will be sold at sidewalk sales, to readers much less scrupulous about their storage.

Some, I’m sure, will simply be pulped — or burned.

6.
Common themes in books, mid- to late- 20th century:

Signed copies of books which immediately go out of print, their authors forgotten

Male poets with sideburns who write poems about driving

Poets of any gender with sad, searching eyes who write about cancer

Long biographical notes which expose their authors’ desperate search for respect

7.
There’s no keeping ego out of the conversation entirely, though. What fiction writer could work for a whole summer handling old novels without wondering about the fate of any book he or she might manage to publish in their lifetime? Based on even the slightest research, the percentages are bad. Is the work you’re producing destined to be recycled — or, now that everyone’s crowing about e-books, erased from the world’s collective hard-drive?

(As if it wasn’t worrying enough to get published in the first place.)

Or, if you’re the type to raise your concerns to the highest power, you can occupy yourself with a larger existential question: why, once you’ve witnessed a pile of words beyond human comprehension — when you’ve personally catalogued more books in a single day than it would be possible for you to read in an entire year — would you ever go on writing novels in the first place?

Forget about the death of the novel, for a moment — that old saw — and consider, instead, its terrifying, zombie-like nature. Old novels never die; they walk among us, tattered and moldy, neither living nor totally destroyed, giving off an offensive fungal stink that can best be described as a cross between rancid dust and damp feet.

Worse still, these zombie books have a way of infecting the living volumes which sit next to them; for every book is only a year’s neglect away from turning undead itself, a victim of time and circumstance, one more body for the undead legions.

From The Library of Babel: “The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms.”

8.
Common trends in books, early-21st century:

Desperation

Confusion

Total lack of clarity

9.
Despite all overarching existential concerns, I usually left my job at the archive feeling exhilarated. Part of this was just a matter of getting off work; like I said before, the job itself was rote and methodical, an amazing combination of repetitive stress and screen fatigue. Just being able to walk free in the summer evening was a glorious feeling.

But, during the best days — when I could leaf through a whole stack of 19th-century French poetry in translation, or the collected prose of William Carlos Williams, or all the books Joseph Mitchell owned concerning Gypsies — I experienced a more than bodily thrill at having run my eyes over so many odd and obscure titles, so many volumes that had survived years and chance to arrive in my hands — a feeling that was only increased by the possibility of the books’ destruction, despite my careful cataloguing. I was there to log books, not to save them.

It was a feeling I can only compare to the narrator of Bohumil Hrabal’sToo Loud a Solitude, a man whose work consists of pulping books into a paper compactor, which he describes as “holy work,” and whose responses to the avalanche of words echo my own:

…inquisitors burn books in vain. If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself… When my eye lands on a real book and looks past the printed word, what it sees is disembodied thoughts flying through the air, gliding on air, living off air, because in the end everything is air…

At times it felt as if I was swimming in sentences, with the sense of Heraclitus, dipping into the river over and over and coming up with new books, new iterations of language, as if by taking the job I’d turned on a continuous flow of literature. Here, individual work seemed frankly meaningless, reminding me that intertextuality is not some new thing — for language is always in conversation with itself.

SOPA would have expanded the arsenal of cease-and-desist tactics that the entertainment industry has been deploying ineffectively for the last 15 years, starting with the crackdowns on file-sharers. Copyright holders would have been able to create an embargo against websites allegedly violating their copyrights by compelling payment processors and ad networks to suspend their services, with very little recourse for contesting the accusation.

Sam – this was a great piece. My hat is off to you for allowing this job to inform your self-reflection and creative process as a thinker/writer. I can only imagine the peculiar nature of what it must have felt like to be continually immersed in those “iterations of language,” ones that reflected the panoply of volumes/items held in that bookstore.

I read this meditative essay with great pleasure. BUT: Wilkie Collins was a genius and is still read—not just by grad students—for pleasure. Moonstone kept me up reading all night perhaps 10 years ago. And just last week I re-read The Woman in White with attentive appreciation, especially for that extraordinary creation, Count Fosco. Holding my nose at reverence for the insipid child-wife.

“Gotham Book Mart?” Obviously! It’s like saying “I was dealing with the legacy of a former president; I can’t tell you which one, but he was so fat he had to have a special bathtub built for him.” And the loss of Gotham is one of the reasons I’m less and less sad about having left the City.

What distinguishes an A poem from a B poem? Should a student writer’s final portfolio be rewarded for revision and growth if the final product remains inadequate? Should a poem receive a high grade if the instructor thinks it demonstrates the potential for publication — or if it merely reflects the elements stressed within the coursework? Do we need to distinguish between students taking an errant creative writing course on the way toward a degree in physics versus students who plan on pursuing an MFA?

We so often debate if creative writing can be taught: that is a romantic question of inspiration versus training, and allows us to comfortably bicker while knowing that creative writing programs are not actually going to disappear. I propose a more practical, immediate debate: how should we grade the work of creative writing students in undergraduate creative writing programs? Despite the nightmarish state of the tenure-track market in the discipline, it is reasonable — and I would argue essential — that we consider the MFA a professional degree. That is another discussion. But what about our undergraduates? Are they being trained to become professional writers? Does that affect how we assess their work?

According to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), undergraduate students should be given grades “for most assignments.” Grades “for revised work should depend on how well students demonstrate that they have transformed their processes for composing and revising.” Many creative writing professors — including myself — have used such a method. A student submits a story early in the semester that is melodramatic and sentimental. They use tags like “shrieked” and “chortled.” The plot of the story goes nowhere — or it goes everywhere, without any control. The prose is as purple as a priest’s vestments during Lent. By the end of the term, the student’s dialogue has more punch. They write with a little more detail. A maudlin ending has become more ambiguous.

They are a better writer. Does that mean they get an A?

When I teach creative writing, I am always pulled in two directions. Part of me wants to let undergraduates roam free. We might start with the opening scene of Big Machine by Victor LaValle or “Royal Beatings” by Alice Munro before setting aside examples and precedents and taking a more mystical approach. Writing without grades. The other part of me — an ethos passed down by generations of my working-class family from the Bronx and Newark — wants my students to create works that others will read. To — God forbid — think they should make money from writing. I want them to stop being private writers and become public writers.

I think my best semesters as a teacher are a mixture of the two methods. Yet a teaching method doesn’t immediately translate into a grading method. Is competency in creative writing a C? Do students who take undergraduate creative writing courses expect those courses to be an easy A? Why does it feel like I am breaking some taboos in even asking these questions?

I want this short essay to start, not end, debate. I know most professors have tried and true approaches to grading. I am not suggesting unilateral grading standards for creative writing — a concept that is naïve, unrealistic, and probably not helpful for students. I am certainly not suggesting rubrics (20 points for exemplary dialogue; 15 points for adequate dialogue…). We don’t need to take this to the extreme, but we should have this conversation. If professors are serious about preparing our students to succeed as writers — and if you are not, you should get the hell out of a classroom — we need to be serious about our discipline. That includes how students are graded.

One grading approach that I’ve returned to is placing a value on sentences. I try to teach students to write the best sentences that they were meant to write. That means a lot of close reading of published and student work, some critical writing, and a significant amount of line-focused revision. The least we can do as creative writing professors is to teach students how to write for an audience: the audience of their professors, their peers, and the often invisible audience of literary magazine editors and readers. Sure, a story can often be made better — but if we always think of creative writing as a sequence of works-in-progress, we avoid the tough decisions that are necessary to grow, and to publish.

Yes, to publish. Undergraduate creative writing students should know the difference between work that has the potential to be published, and work that is nowhere near reaching an audience. We should not only give an A to publication-ready work, but I fear that we are so afraid of talking too much about publication with young writers that we delay the inevitable.

Some might say these debates are better left to intra-department squabbles. But so often those debates are intellectual exercises, and forgotten before the next semester’s syllabus is distributed. We can do better. Grading has a practical purpose, but in this context, it is a measure of when writing is successful, and when it is not. We should give creative writing — this weird, beautiful art that has the power to stir souls — the academic respect it deserves. We owe it to our students.

In her collection of essays and talks The Wave in the Mind, Ursula K. Le Guin wonders why we have book tours at all. “It wasn’t until the seventies, I think, that publishers realised they could sell more books by sending their author to two hundred cities in eight days to sign them,” she told a Women in Language conference in 1998. “So now here in Berkeley you have Black Oak and Cody’s, and we in Portland have Powell’s and the Looking Glass, and Seattle has Elliot Bay Books running two readings a day every day of the week and people come.”

I packed The Wave in the Mind into my luggage as I set out from Britain for North America. Not least because I’d be visiting Portland, Ore., Le Guin’s home city; and not only because 35 percent minimum of my carry-on is reading material; but as an unknown British writer, I needed to holdfast to Le Guin’s promise for my 12-events-in-seven-cities first book tour: people come!

I hoped my other reading would be as encouraging: Han Kang’sThe Vegetarian, J.M. Coetzee’sElizabeth Costello, and, on the recommendation of a friend, Elizabeth Gilbert’sBig Magic. I’d pick up others along the way. All would be serendipitous. I’m going to learn from them not only how to handle a book tour better, but how to be better, fully stop.

Lantern Books, Brooklyn, N.Y.“This is how I want to spend my life,” writes Gilbert in Big Magic, “collaborating to the best of my ability with forces of inspiration that I can neither see, nor prove, nor command, nor understand.”

This was how I wanted to spend my life, too — as a published author. I’d come to Brooklyn for the launch of my debut, The Pig in Thin Air. The event marked a psychological “end” to writing the book; despite having done publicity events in the U.K., New York provided closure on the book’s making. Lesson one, perhaps: writing a book is a desperately personal thing, and only you know when it’s “finished.” I needed a public introduction for that. I needed that moment to be recognized.

Pig is my first published book. I’ve always written: journalism, non-fiction, short stories, flash fiction, and I teach writing too. I have a mob of novels complaining bitterly of unfinished business from their various stashes. Pig came after a 2014 tour of North America working with organizations and individuals changing our species’ relationship to nonhuman animals. I approached Lantern Books with an idea based on this trip: a carnivore-to-vegan literary memoir, and a study of how we come closer to the animals we eat. The publisher was keen. I wrote the book in six months. Another nine of rewriting, copy editing, and proofing later, and Pig was published.

Then the hard work began. If you’re Thomas Merton, it’s okay if your books “stand outside all processes of production, marketing, consumption, and destruction.” For the rest of us, there are sales to make. A publisher to please. It means months of emails, organizing events. It means the people at Powell’s and Elliot Bay saying, “We’ve got Murakami that night…what did you say your name was?” It means more time on social media than is good for any writer, in an attempt to secure an audience.

I’ve got an audience in Brooklyn. Readers, artists, wine buyers, magazine editors. My introduction is conducted by my publisher. I calm my nerves (will I read well?; answer clearly?) by recalling Big Magic’s closing exhortation: “we did not come all this great distance, and make all this great effort, only to miss the party at the last moment.”

On the face of it, you couldn’t get two more different books, or writers, than myself and Gilbert; Pig, and Big Magic. But in other ways I couldn’t have chosen (okay, it was a recommendation) a better book as company. Before Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert was a writer without fame or fortune. She had three well-received books, and still worked full-time elsewhere. But like Gilbert, “my intention was to spend my entire life in communion with writing” and that meant finding a way to be the professional writer; maybe even making money from it. Because I was not making any money from this tour. Lesson two: in Gilbert’s words, “I became my own patron” to make this tour happen. Even mid-list authors at big publishing houses are expected to organize, and usually pay for, their promotion and travel. And that’s okay.

Lesson three: opening nights will always be nerve-wracking. But that’s okay too. The evening is full of goodwill and good sales and good food and fireflies and my new shoes start to break in; and, yeah, I’ve finally achieved something I’ve dreamt of for 35 years. I count myself lucky; a little bit of big magic has found its way to my door.

Various Locations, Including a Chicken Slaughterhouse, TorontoThe last two chapters of Pig tell the story of my involvement with the Save Movement, a group advocating for the end of the exploitation of nonhuman animals, which holds regular vigils to bear witness to the vast numbers of animals killed every day. Pig is one of the first published accounts of this movement, and it’s important for me to return and support their work; okay, as well as sell my books.

On the flight from New York I read Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. As a vegan writer, there are few representations of veganism or vegetarianism in literature; I want to study them, to see how we come across. Pig is a vegan memoir; in my fictional writing, also, I experiment with vegan characters to explore difference, especially around toxic masculinities (the macho need for meat). The Vegetarian was — or should have been — the ideal book to read before hosting a potluck, reading to a crowd outside a slaughterhouse, and giving a talk to activists at the University of Toronto.

But The Vegetarian is a disappointing book (Jon Yargo and I will have to disagree on this one). The emotions are “vague” and “almost.” The female protagonist is passive; we hear her voice only through italicized fragments or the eyes of of other people. As Kate Tempest says, “there’s a temptation to create passive female characters. It’s a narrative trap set up by the male standard that you’ve got to fight. I don’t know why I fell into it. I don’t even know any passive women!” It’s easy to see what Kang has tried to do by exploring the ways in which male culture objectifies women — but do you do that by again objectifying a woman?

But The Vegetarian was the right book to read for Toronto. It made me observe more closely the active (not passive) and present (not withdrawn) women who lead the advocacy movement in the city. The vigils are organized and run mainly by women. There are men participating, but the Save movement is led and shaped by proactive, intelligent, and compassionate women. So across my three events, I prioritize reading the sections that speak to the ways in which feminist ethical thought has shaped my work. That feels the right thing to do for this white, British, middle-class man with a book in his hand.

I need a new book for travelling. My host Lorena, who runs healing circles for those who attend the vigils, tells me about a second-hand store 10 minutes walk away: Circus Books & Music. Within half an hour I’ve got four new titles, including The Beluga Café by Pacific Northwest writer Jim Nollman, a book that will come in handy later.

The FARM Animal Rights Conference, Los AngelesFour days in a hotel. I’m here to “work the room” and promote Pig to hundreds of animal-loving attendees as well as help out on the Lantern Books table, and do my first official signing. Conferences can be good places to sell your book if the theme is aligned. But four days? That’s a lot of “working the room” for a writer who prefers early nights.

By Day Three and the awards dinner it’s all a bit much. I’ve done my “meet the writer” signing. I need time out. I get caught reading a novel at the bar while the other 1,700 delegates are, mostly, attending the gala. At least the novel is Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, the most well-known fiction to explore our relationship with the animals we eat. The only “appropriate way and indeed the only way in which to absorb [the novel],” says Costello, “is in silence and in solitude.” It’s too cramped in the gala; too many people; and too much weird singing. For an introvert writer, a book tour is a many-peopled challenge. And the conferences at which our books might sell are one long, tiring, smiling engagement.

A Hollywood music producer comes over and starts chatting. This is the type of contact I should be cultivating, says my promotional brain; she produced the sound for the new advocacy film Unity. She’s attractive, too. “Does the mind by nature prefer sensation to ideas; the tangible to the abstract?” asks Coetzee of Elizabeth Costello’s son as he lies in bed with a woman he’s just met at…okay, a conference (albeit one at which his mother, not he, is the invited writer). Well, tonight the mind prefers the ideas, the abstract. I need quietude; to read.

As soon as I say this, the music producer admits she’s overwhelmed by all the people too. She squats down — I don’t ask her to sit — and we talk about the need for creative solitude. I didn’t expect there to be much on this tour — but this little? Another lesson: you cannot, as Le Guin says, be both a writer and a person on the book tour. “People line up to ‘meet the writer,’ not realizing this is impossible,” she continues. “Nobody can be a writer during a book tour […] All their admirers can meet is the person — who has a lot in common with, but is not, the writer. Maybe duller, maybe older, maybe meaner.” Right then, probably all three.

Writers live with this contradiction. We read in solitude, and we write in solitude. But in between, we need to make connections, and it can be a trial, a judgement. We do it as person or writer (or both); and yet who this I, this you, this writer/person is, is anybody’s guess. Perhaps, as Le Guin says, the book tour “recovers for us the social act.” It brings us out into the world again. It might feel like the gates of hell, but it is also a doorway to other people.

Phinney Books, Greenwood, Seattle, Wash.The dreaded fear on every tour is, of course, that no one will turn up. Well, not no one. That would be okay; you slink off with only the bookseller’s disdainful smile and a few hours saved (nothing more welcome than a cancelled social engagement). But if two people and a dog turn up, you have to sit through the embarrassment and shame that they know that you know that hardly anyone came out for you. And that despite your author-status, in this town, on this night, you’re still a nobody. That smarts.

Apparently there’s an anthology about book reading failures. I cannot find it, and perhaps the included writers have thought better and sought injunctions to have it censored. Or maybe it’s that, as Gilbert says in Big Magic, failure is not what it seems to be. According to the acclaimed Anne Enright, “failure is what writers do.”

Tell that to a writer waiting for a crowd to arrive on a warm, sunny evening in Seattle. Warm and sunny means people don’t want to come inside. Great.

I go onto social media to seek advice from fellow writers. The best is from ethicist Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat. “Don’t judge by numbers. Give those two people (and the dog) everything that you’d give a larger crowd. Then you know you haven’t let them down. Or yourself.”

And so that’s what I do. Seattle is my smallest event. But there are some people, including a friend, and including a woman from the mid-sized non-profit Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine, who happens to be in town. She buys a book, and is generous in her praise of the talk. And yet that isn’t the magic. About halfway through, two young girls (and a dog! called Fenway) slip in at the back. When the questions begin, one of the girls shares her story: she was diagnosed as diabetic, and was on her way to losing her sight and having a foot amputated. But she adopted a vegan diet, recovered her sight and saved her foot. She’s still diabetic, but her health is massively improved.

I understand that — while it is no panacea or cure-all — vegan food practices are healthier for humans, and the only way to feed a planet of nine billion. Others in the audience give the girl incredulous looks. But the woman from PCRM corroborates her story with direct reference to medical research.

Then I understand: this event isn’t for me. I didn’t organize it to sell books. I organized it so this young woman could have her story validated by the woman from PCRM, who she would never have met otherwise. And I learn this lesson well: you don’t write the book for yourself. Once it’s published, it’s not yours. It’s theirs.

Before I leave, I ask Tom the bookseller (and author of A Reader’s Book of Days, essential desktop material for all writers) what he’d recommend. He puts in my hands The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt.

“It’s an old book, but reissued,” he says. “It’s my favorite right now.”

“Okay, then I’ll take it,” I say, equally unequivocally.

I’m full of relief the evening is over, eager to settle up and have a drink at a bar. So eager in fact that I trade the sale of three Pigs for which Tom has taken the money, for The Last Samurai. This is a learning in itself: that getting out of the bookstore with your profit can be an escape act — not because of the bookseller, but because of a) the relief of selling any at all; and b) what else do you do with cash in a bookstore?

So I leave two bucks down, and four copies of Pig heavier, taking back some advances I’d sent ahead. I start reading The Last Samurai that night. It’s a sublimely written tale of the life of Ludovic, a child genius, and his mother Sybilla, that explores the limits of genius (or knowledge porn, as Brian Hurley puts it) through Ludo’s search for his father, told through his prodigious learning — dozens of languages, engineering, history, literature, film. All this is sieved through their mother-and-son obsession with Akira Kurosawa’s film Seven Samurai.

It’s only now that I wonder if my fear of the low turnout and the, well, actual low turnout, was on Tom’s mind as he recommended The Last Samurai. In the last pages, when Ludo’s narrative arc has come to its end, he meets another genius, a pianist his mother once took him to see in concert. This pianist cannot play concerts any longer because of his unconventional and noncommercial approach. Their discussion turns to what art is worth making and how to put it into the world. That is, even if there are only five people in the world who will buy the pianist’s CD (my book) but they are the type of person who will buy his CD (my book) and get off their train (path in life) to work for a sculptor in Paris (challenge themselves and do something amazing)…does he (me) need 10,000 people to buy his CD (my book)? Does he (I) need 1,000 people at his concert (my reading)?

Or just the five people (and dog!) that matter? Discuss.

Village Books, Bellingham, Wash.Or, let’s talk about fathers. Jim Nollman’s The Beluga Café is an enjoyable book. Considering it was published in 2002, it was weird how often it turned up on shelves during my tour. Perhaps the most magical element is that, for an adventure with “art, music and whales in the far North” the artist-adventurers never actually see any whales. There’s a hint of this when Nollman quotes Rainer Maria Rilke: “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.” But it’s a good book for touring the Pacific Northwest. It’s a story of the clash of cultures between Western colonial whites and the Inuit. It would be a lifesaver during the reading at Village Books.

I’d fallen on a successful pattern for book readings of less than 20 people. I’d introduce how I wrote Pig, then read for 10 to 15 minutes and open it up to the audience to hear their stories, before reading another section. I ask Clarissa, a local vegan who’d given me support on Twitter in generating interest for the event, to share her story. Then I open it up to the wider audience; a man in his ’60s puts up his hand.

“So, you, as a vejjan [sic]” he says to me, “what do you think about the Native Americans hunting whales?”

I’d wanted the moment to be a sharing of stories, not Q&A, and whales hadn’t featured; but okay, I’d read Nollman so I was prepared. No, I’m not another white British colonialist telling the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest they can’t hunt whale. But for myself, as for Jim Nollman and his companions, I just don’t believe people can “own” whales.

It settles him. The conversation continues, I read another section, and then there’s the Q&A. The troublemaker raises his hand.

I often read from the first half of Pig, a memoir of growing up as a meat eater, and the family consternation at my attempts to go vegetarian. So I talk about growing up, and explain how my father is/was an alcoholic, and in 2008 went on a bender and went missing — and remains missing. I read this bit, admitting that it’s also for affect. I want to move people with my writing; and this bit moves people.

I never guessed anyone would actually ask me about it.

“So can you explain the relevance of your missing father to this book?”

Later, a friend says she wanted to hug me (and slug the guy). But wasn’t this why I’d written the book? To answer that question: not for him, but for myself?

I say that toxic masculinity is a major global problem; the perverse need for men to dominate others, to own or consume their flesh, is wrecking our world. And maybe having a father whom I rebelled against at such an early age, who left my mother when I was two, providing my sister and I with a childhood shaped more by women who cared and less by men who drank, made me feel this way. Staring down the crises we face — climate change, deforestation, water pollution, our common health problems, gender inequality, the suffering of other species — calls for care and interdependence, not more toxic machismo.

Another guy in the crowd thanks me for what I’ve said, and shares his own story. After the reading is over, the troublemaker comes up.

“You know, I rescue those little black and red ladybugs from my car windscreen and put them into the grass,” he says. “So maybe I’m a little bit vejjan too.”

Hey, maybe. Isn’t that a start?

Silently I thank Jim Nollman and his sober failure in the Arctic, a failure that, as a writer and artist, he suffered, but was able to blend into a humble story of adventure and commitment. “Few professionals make their livings describing internal demons,” writes Nollman. “These professionals have decided that the internal story must be excised from their documentaries and non-fiction accounts, best left to novelists and feature-film writers to invent. What is it? Sissy? Too difficult? Too personal? Or is it just deemed uninteresting?”

Too difficult? Too personal? I don’t know. What I do know is I’m glad I wrote that part about my father. I’m glad I read it out. And I’m glad I was asked that question.

Portland, Ore., Vancouver, B.C., the EndThere are two more stops on the tour — Portland and Vancouver, B.C., and five more lunches and readings and dinners and signings, including a talk in a church to 150 people, which emphasizes the lessons I’ve learnt. Not least of these is that having locals on the ground organizing and supporting makes the event go swimmingly. So what practical things have I learnt for the next tour?

two people and a dog is okay, too — and sometimes, better
invitation is better than confrontation
rely on social media only so far
don’t think that you’ll get downtime in between events
being professional counts; those sore shoes, trimmed nails, suit jacket all go towards the impression you leave on the individuals who turn up

I may have laid down on the floor of an Airbnb apartment and cried that I did not want to get up and travel for another six hours to do it all again. But I did get up. I did do it all again. And what I earned from doing that will not be taken away easily.

What did I earn? Freedom. Freedom from the fear that your work doesn’t count. It counts. Even if it’s for the five people who buy your book, but those five people, as Ludo says, cross the bridge, take a train, and go to work for a famous sculptor (or some similarly beautiful thing) because they read your book (or listened to your CD).

“The most ancient, most urgent function of words,” writes Le Guin, is “to form for us ‘mental representations of things not actually present,’ so that we can form a judgment of what world we live in and where we might be going in it, what we can celebrate, what we must fear.”

We create books or write essays and invest in the infrastructure around that writing; we put it into people’s hands and ask them to read, or listen. This is an auxiliary but no less essential part of the writer’s craft. It is a hard slog; there is little downtime in the downtime. But the joy of meeting people and having them hear your words; the emails and reviews that emerge from the ether; the connections made between people who ‘get’ the same mental representation that you do… All this means that maybe you’ve given them something to think about, and that changes them.

My dad is not a writer, though his camp letters to me many years ago betrayed an ability to fashion the written word in a surprisingly vigorous manner, particularly when stacked up against the troubled verb conjugations of his spoken words. “What do you mean, Dad, a manuscript?” I asked.

The man who ran the magic-trick concession at Polk’s Hobby Shop, now just a distant memory on 31st and Fifth, always wore a white shirt, cuffs rolled (“Nothing up my sleeves”), narrow tie loosened at the throat, and above it all a five o’clock shadow that seemed to tell its own story of late nights and long hangovers. His midfield gaze and melancholic smile spoke of a lifetime of disappointment and the kind of dashed dreams that push you to the back row of life: canceled gigs, second-billings and threadbare audiences in the Poconos or the Catskills. His job at Polk’s was to perform trick after trick, encourage you to buy one, and then afterwards take you behind his counter where he kept his brown-bag lunch and his Daily Mirror and where he quietly and discreetly showed you how it was done. His breath was a cocktail of bourbon and Sen-Sen. By that time money had changed hands, and the horrible realization that nothing magic had actually happened—that the whole damned thing was just another cheap trick crudely devised with bits of wire and lengths of fishing line—also meant that refunds were not available. Magic, like life, he seemed to be saying, is just another five-buck trick.

When night falls and gravity has its way with him, he goes uptown to an apartment you can see from the number 4 train to Woodlawn as you head north out of Manhattan. He drinks Seagrams and watches the fights and falls asleep in front of “Sergeant Bilko” or “The $64,000 Question.” He does the occasional charity show, or performs at kids’ parties, tossing down a shot before setting out for an afternoon of mystification. When once a month he gets together with his fellow practitioners of the black arts he’s a real kibitzer, lurking by the bar, slapping backs and telling jokes. He’s had a wife, who ran away with another performer, and the two of them live in Vegas. Eventually her husband will retire, she’ll trade in the Caddy for an Accord, and now and again she’ll think of the man she left who worked at Polk’s, and of how, when they were both young and in love, he could pull a Queen of Hearts from the air and make her feel like the luckiest woman in the whole wide world.

He was just a guy I used to see on the Saturdays my mother took me to Polk’s, but he’s stuck with me over the years, living in that apartment in the back of my memory, palming coins and fanning cards behind that glass counter. That newspaper; the rolled sleeves; the five o’clock shadow. Out of those few remembered details comes an entire life. It may not be exactly his, but I’ll find a place for him somewhere.

Some years ago, at an eighth grade graduation (not my own, eighth grade for me being nothing but a dim memory on the Hudson midway between Sing-Sing Prison and the Rockefeller estate), the guest speaker had brought what she called the Backpack for Life. In it contained everything that the graduates would need for setting out on their great journey in life. There was a mirror, a comb, a pen, a notebook, and five or six other objects, all of them giving way to meditations on why these would be important. What dawned on me was that she left out one big thing: all the baggage that the average eighth-grader has picked up along the way and stuffed into the other backpack. That bag would be mighty heavy. You ain’t going to ninth grade with that, my young friend.

Or, rather, you are. By the time you reach college it’ll be even heavier. And just wait until you’re forty, when you really start feeling the weight of it. Or fifty—? At that stage an 18-wheeler might just do the trick.

Lately I’ve been meditating on the nature of writing fiction out of one’s own life. I know what they tell you in writing school (even though I never took a writing course in my life): write what you know. Which means what the average young author knows: childhood, parent issues, girlfriend or boyfriend angst, bad skin, the odd broken limb, summer jobs, applying to college, then college and, if you need a few extra years to kill, graduate school. There’s a lot of emotional material there, all the growing issues and coping issues, the triumphs and disappointments, and these are important, because childhood and adolescence are the great gateway experiences to adulthood, middle-age, the so-called golden years, and then decrepitude when you get to forget all the stuff you agonized over for so long. All that, waiting to be unpacked. By that time it’s too big for a backpack. We’re talking about a whole civilization you’ve buried in your backyard.

No one had ever told me to write what I know, so my first five or six attempts at fiction were about writing what I wanted to know—books set in countries where I hadn’t (yet) lived, about characters utterly unlike myself, until I was ready to write what became my first published novel, which was set mostly in France of the 1930s and 40s and in London of the 1970s and 80s, where I was then living. The characters bore no relation to anyone I knew, but for the fact that they were Russian, and I’m Russian by ancestry. Nothing in the book is drawn from my life, save for the narrator’s need to create a story out of his past. Is it true, or is it just another con game, like the ones his parents played in the South of France all those years ago? The narrator is creating a fiction both to give his life some sense and to cover up what really happened in Nice in 1938 and in Paris during the German Occupation. What I had was a circumstance and a handful of characters, and I just wanted to know who these people were and what they were up to; answering these questions was my goal.

While screenwriting is the art of disclosing a story determined in advance, writing fiction is all about excavation, luck and discovery. As a novelist you start your dig (John Fowles famously woke from a dream about a woman standing at the end of the Cobb in Lyme Regis and out of that single image came The French Lieutenant’s Woman). Your shovel turns over clots of soil, worms, shards of pottery, bits of glass. Maybe an ancient coin or two. And if you’re very lucky, you hit something immovable in that deep earth and uncover the city of gold that’s been buried for so long. It might be your own past, or even just the tomb of someone you’d forgotten and who, awakened from the deep slumber of oblivion, comes to life and steps onto the page and, like a magician, plucks out of the air something amazing for you to write about. But attempt this too early and you’ll turn up only familiar things, fresh memories not yet ripened by time. Experience really demands a degree of strangeness before one can write about it. We need to outgrow the person we were way back then in order to see him whole.

Seven or eight years ago my wife and I were watching Quentin Tarantino’sJackie Brown. I’m not sure what sparked the memory, but I turned to my wife and said with complete clarity and certainty, “We never dug it up.” That was the origin of a recently-completed novel. My memory had snapped into focus, shot me back some thirty years, and I had the beginnings of my story. Time, memory and objectivity, the ability to gaze back and dispassionately see a period of one’s life as a finished thing, observable and definable: this is what a writer needs before taking it on as material for a book.

It began as a script. On one level it was a buddy story (these do well: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,Easy Rider, even Sideways); on another, a crime story, a caper film. What I discovered after writing it as a screenplay is that no one in Hollywood is much interested in a movie starring a couple of old guys in their 50s. Can you make them, oh, twenty-three or something like that? I could almost hear that voice in my ear. And can you add some shoot-outs and crashes?

No, I could not. This was the story I was going to tell. It was about something I’d buried and forgotten for all these many years. It began with a different me from the one that’s here now. And, oh, before I forget, along the way I was going to reveal more about myself and my own experiences than I’d ever done before. I own up to crimes and lapses both real and moral: things I’d thought I’d forgotten; things I’d done that I’d allowed to sink into the mud of oblivion. Until now. My backpack is all the lighter for it. My conscience is clear. And my backyard is a damned mess. I’m still digging up bodies.